


Unto Jerusalem

by kariye



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: (sort of) breathplay, M/M, Minor Drug Use, Minor Violence, Orgasm Delay/Denial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-03
Updated: 2012-05-03
Packaged: 2017-11-04 19:08:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/397203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kariye/pseuds/kariye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A love song for John Sheppard, Lt. Col., USAF; a love song for Atlantis, city. Some knowledge is written bone-deep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unto Jerusalem

**Author's Note:**

> This is a previously posted work. Reposting here as I have closed down the journal it was originally posted in. 
> 
> Beta’d by perverse_idyll, who outdid even herself. This one’s for us.

John leans against the wall until Carter’s turned away from McKay. The line of her neck is tight. 

Rodney frowns as she heads out of the debriefing room and toward the nearest transporter. “I don’t think she used to be so tense.”

“Tense?” John stares at him. “We nearly lost three of my men today. In the city. On what was supposed to be a routine exploration of Section S-9.7. Saunders still hasn’t woken up yet.” 

“Huh.” McKay’s eyes flash John’s way and back toward the now-empty corridor. “Maybe it’s the stress of command. Not everyone’s cut out for it, you know.” Something in his tone is off, a hair too jovial. 

John cocks his head. “You want to do it?” and Rodney looks back at him, his expression shifting.

“I don’t need to.” He says it as if John should know this. 

John feels his lower lip press against his teeth as his lips thin. Maybe he does. 

“Anyway,” McKay says after the briefest pause, “it wasn’t Section S-9.7. It was W-1.2.” That odd lightness is back in his voice. “The cutoff between the South and West sections of the city falls precisely on the 45 degree angle measured from the center of the city. And the marines are going to be fine. You heard Keller.”

“No,” John says. They fall into step next to each other. “We agreed that because there’s no corridor running on the line of the angle, we’d move the line southwest to the nearest accessible hallway so that men on the ground can more quickly calculate their positions. It’s Section S-9.7.” He has no idea why he’s going along with this pointless conversation. “Keller also said that a minute and a half longer in that room and the gas leak would have caused severe and permanent brain damage in all three of my men.”

Rodney frowns again. “You’re missing the point, Colonel. Your men will be fine.” He pulls out a powerbar and opens it with his teeth and right hand. His computer is tucked under his left arm. “It’s a rough introduction to Atlantis,” he says around the first mouthful. “Not the city at her finest moment. But those men are new to Atlantis, and stupid mistakes get made out of ignorance.” 

“Are you—” John stops in the middle of the hallway. It’s empty and he steps forward, into McKay’s space, because he can, because this is all wrong, because – “Are you trying to comfort me?” 

The idea is so absurd that he can hardly think it, and anyway, McKay’s doing a piss-poor job of it. Maybe he’s just trying to get John to shut up. John would laugh if he didn’t have three men on their backs in the infirmary, men who got hurt in Atlantis, Atlantis where they should be safe. 

McKay lifts his chin. “Do you need comforting, Colonel? What happened today wasn’t your fault, right? You said so yourself, it was an accident.”

John hesitates, just barely, before he snaps, “That’s what I said.” From the small curl of Rodney’s mouth it looks like he catches that pause.

“Then you must be right. We couldn’t find anything wrong with the city’s wiring, programming, or power systems that would have made her just shut down an entire section without warning. There was nothing new introduced into the environment that should have made her self-quarantine and release counteractive chemicals like she did today.” McKay sounds anything but sincere. Snide, perhaps; angry definitely, completely at odds with his calm words.

“Accidents happen,” McKay finishes. 

John slams his hand into the wall next to Rodney’s head. “Not on Atlantis. They’re not supposed to happen here, not now,” John grits out. 

Rodney flinches but stands his ground. “Atlantis takes care of her own.”

“So do I, McKay. What are you saying? Those men are new, yes, but they’re my responsibility now.”

“Then act like it, Colonel.”

“There’s a session tonight. Training. I expect a lot of the newcomers to attend. I know Saunders and Vegas were going to come.” John tries to keep his voice even. Now is not a good time for McKay to push him like this. 

“It’s been almost three weeks since they got here. Couldn’t you have set it up sooner, broken them in by now, maybe have avoided this?” 

“I didn’t—Jesus. I don’t need to explain to you, McKay. I don’t owe you anything, not about this.”

“No?” Rodney’s smile is quirky, unhappy. It disappears in an instant. “I know you’re pissed off, Sheppard. About today, about lots of things.” His voice is low and intent. “Pissed at me and my scientists for not getting the marines out of there sooner, and you’re damn lucky I got them out at all because it took everything I had to convince the city’s locking system to let them go. Pissed at Saunders, Vegas, and Morgenstern for getting into that situation in the first place. At the Asurans and the Wraith and probably the whole Pegasus galaxy for getting in your way, for distracting you from training the newbies sooner. Pissed at Elizabeth for getting hurt and leaving, at Carter for just stepping in and trying to do her job. And I know damn well you’re pissed at the city, too. For everything.”

He pauses and sucks in air. “But you know what?” he hisses. “I’m furious too, and I’m not going to just watch you—”

But John interrupts. “Not pissed,” and he is quiet now. “I’m not mad. It’s – I’m—”

Rodney steps even closer, so close that John can smell his breath, not-coffee, slightly stale, familiar. “What, Colonel? What are you?” 

John breathes in, one, two, and he’s aware of Atlantis’s wall smooth under his hand, warm where he touches her, of his cock, of Rodney’s thigh next to his, of Rodney’s unblinking eyes, the stubble on his chin. John wants to rub himself against the prickly hair, make a rash, scratch away the frantic hum that’s clawing his skin inside out. It’s been there for days, weeks, a low-grade itch, but this morning it flared red, welted out. When Simpson radioed him and McKay that there’d been an accident in Section S-9.7, when he saw the look of disappointment on Teyla’s face, when he saw Miko glance at McKay for instructions and lower her eyes once, when he looked at Lorne and Lorne looked at him and they both looked at Carter, and then they were out the door heading south. “Keep me updated,” he’d told McKay. 

“John?” 

John steps back. 

He carries with him the ghost imprint of Rodney’s body, his hip carving an indent into the soft of Rodney’s lower belly. He resists the urge to move toward Rodney again. To lean back, lean forward. To lick his dry lips. Instead he says, “It takes a while for the word to spread. We’ve been busy. Besides, these sessions aren’t mandatory. You know that. I can’t make them come if they don’t want to be there.”

“Won’t.”

“The smart ones come.” 

Rodney’s expression is familiar and frustrated, twisted mouth. “But if you’re not mad, then what – ” but John shakes his head, a jerky motion. 

“Accidents happen, McKay.”

He carries away with him the sensation of Rodney’s anger. It skates along his bones, tracing cuts already open in his marrow. 

+++

There is a fruit, blackred and tart and sweet and crispy that stains the fingers and mouth. It’s exactly like a cherry except that it’s nothing like a cherry because it’s sweet where cherries are tart, and tart where cherries are sweet, and John loves it so much more than he ever liked cherries on Earth, which he didn’t. 

John doesn’t usually say things exuberantly, except when they involve guns or, occasionally, the puddle jumpers, but this fruit – it’s the sort of thing that he’s okay with, that he can sit in the mess where everyone can hear and say, “This is good,” even, “I love this stuff, let’s make sure we get more.” 

Somehow, after that, he never runs out of the fruit. Even when it’s not in season, someone always makes sure he has it. 

“Duh,” McKay says. He wraps his hands around his mug of coffee, the kind that John could have sworn they ran out of four months ago, just three months after they left Earth on their one-way expedition. “You said you liked it. You’re not fooling anyone, Major.”

It’s Ford who lays it out. He looks at John like he’s an idiot. John wonders if he’s been spending too much time with McKay. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“Granted.”

“The men aren’t stupid. Sumner might have been a mean son of a bitch, but you – you’re one crazy motherfucker. Sir. No one minds giving you a few cherries, if they make you happy.” He grins. “Besides, I think half the scientists have a crush on you. McKay let it slip that you do have a brain under that hair, even if you don’t use it very often. Uh. His words, sir.”

+++

Ford says to him one day, “Have you ever noticed how, I don’t know, even everything is here?”

“Even?” They’re taking munitions inventory. Bates is off interviewing Athosians with Elizabeth, and John’s already sick of all the paperwork that command has brought with it. He’d rather count guns and C4. He almost has a new respect for all his past commanding officers – except that he doesn’t – for all the hours they put in at the desk. If it’d been him, he’d have been straining toward the sky, toward the flight hangar, toward anywhere outside the push-pinned maps and computer screens and walls of the command post. Texas, Afghanistan, McMurdo. Everywhere in between. 

“Yes, sir. Like, okay, here. We’re sitting in what’s basically a supply closet. We don’t know what the Ancients used it for, but it was obviously some kind of storage space. But there are all these designs on either side of the door, and some running along the top of the room. Repeating patterns.”

“Ancient wall border,” John says. 

Ford laughs. “Yes, sir.”

John wants to tell him to knock it off, to stop with the sirs already, the first time is enough, but he figures that’s not how it works now. He’s the CO, god, and he didn’t ask for this. It’s not all bad – he doesn’t have to sir anyone anymore, and he’s never really been the best with rank and respect – but that makes him the man around here, as if there’s not enough else to worry about. 

“If you look at them, there are five panels or whatever you want to call them on each side of the door. And they’re perfectly aligned with the same pattern inside. I don’t know if it’s Ancient writing or just some weird design that doesn’t mean anything, but it’s all even. Just like on the wall border.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is symmetrical,” says John. 

Ford nods. “It’s like this everywhere. In our rooms, in the mess, in the control room. Even the dead plants. Ever see just one sitting out? No. There’ll be a shrub, then maybe a door or a staircase or control panel, and then another plant, same kind. Even pruned the same way.”

John looks at him and back at the sidearm on his lap that he can’t get to fit back in with the rest. “You a biologist now, Ford?” He smiles quick and easy at him.

“No, sir.” Ford locks up a crate containing C4. If John notices his hand linger on it, he doesn’t say anything. Ford’s not a bad kid. A bit eager to blow things up, maybe, but it’s an insane galaxy out there. John’s beginning to understand the urge.

“Last night, sir, on the lower level in the east wing, with the men,” Ford begins.

John examines the gun he’s still holding. “Last night, Lieutenant?” He looks sideways at Ford, with a closed-off expression.

“Uh. Yeah.” There’s a hesitation. “Are there – do you think it’s going to happen again? You gonna let—”

John slots the 9mm in right where it should be and snaps the lid shut. He meets Ford’s eyes. “I wasn’t there. Did you see anything that shouldn’t have happened?” 

“Uh. No.” He sounds surprised to hear himself say that, but then he says it with more certainty. “No, sir.” 

“It’s a different world here, Lieutenant. People need an outlet, and I’m flexible as long as everyone plays fair and pays up what they owe. We have to keep going, no matter what it takes.” Because they might not have been in Atlantis long, but already one of the first rules of the city is that bets will be settled, scored evened, and debts paid. 

“Yes, sir.”

“I think we’re done here.” John stands.

“Yes, sir,” Ford says briskly with a salute, and then he grins again, all eagerness out to conquer not just the world but an entire galaxy, sure in his own ability the way only the young can be. He turns at the door. “You should come down sometime.”

+++

It’s an invasion of privacy to override McKay’s lock on his door. John does it anyway. 

He could use his security codes as military commander to do it, but he doesn’t have to. The city lets him. It responds to his gene in a way that it doesn’t to anyone else. Sometimes it’s a little odd how the city seems almost to anticipate what he’s going to do, the way it lights up when he steps into a room, the way it shows him things on its screens when he touches them. He knows it’s just the city’s machines and subroutines reacting to his gene, that the city’s made up of technology that’s almost as far beyond their understanding as Pegasus is from the Milky Way, and that that technology acts in ways that seem independent but is really just some well-designed and subtle programming. 

He knows this. That doesn’t make it any less odd when McKay’s locked door opens before he’s even in front of it, while he’s still four feet away thinking about how he’s going to get in there. 

Rodney is not amused when he comes in, but John makes it up to him. McKay spends the next week designing private locking systems for his door and then challenges John to get past them. 

+++

“How’d you do this, son?” Carson asks. 

Lieutenant Yaxley clears his throat. “I tripped, Doctor.”

“You tripped.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Aye.” Carson sighs and turns to John, who’s standing by the door with his arms crossed. Carson made him come down. “Colonel, this is the third tripping incident we’ve had in two weeks. All with new personnel fresh off the Daedalus. Well, to be fair, Dr. Shushkin told me she didn’t see the wall and ran into it. Now I know you’ve got a city to take care of, but so do I. Do you think we can keep the tripping incidents to a minimum?” 

John’s always found the airquotes that Carson keeps using around the word “trip” to be really annoying. But, “Sure, Doc,” he says, elongating the syllables, because he’s not stupid. He has a healthy respect for Carson. 

“I’ve got some wee babies to inoculate,” Carson says with a cheery smile a few weeks after he helps wipe out half a population and gives the Wraith good cause to finish the job the next time they come calling. He fusses over sprained ankles with the care of a grandmother offering chicken soup and chocolate chip cookies at the same time that he concocts retroviruses and leaves them lying around so that John can turn into a blue fucking bug. Carson’s mother raised him with morals, and he’s more than smart enough to understand the consequences of his actions – hell, to fret over them – and yet he goes ahead anyway. 

“Hello, Michael,” he’d said. “And how are you feeling today, then?”

“Dr. Beckett,” Yaxley says, “I really did trip. You ever – do you ever see things here? In the hallways, out of the corner of your eye?”

“Like shadows,” Dr. Shushkin had told them four days ago. “If you look at them straight on, they disappear.”

“They slink around corners,” Wai-Chi Huang said, his cheeks flushing red. “Like something trying to get your attention, but something that’s shy.”

“Something that’s hiding something,” said Corporal Ray last year. He glared at an unoffending spot on the wall just over John’s shoulder. “Sir. Could there be a Wraith on base?”

Elizabeth inhaled the steam from her tea. “The Athosians sent it today. From their first crop. I find it relaxing.” She hesitated. “Do you ever feel like we’re not alone here?”

“It is warm, comforting.” John was working on the jumpers with Zelenka. “Very feminine. A little coy, yes, attractive, but also like a sister eager to see you after you have been away. Well, maybe she is a little more possessive than that.”

John stared at him. “You get all this out of seeing shadows out of the corner of your eye?”

“Ovšem. Certainly. What do you see?”

“I never said I saw anything.” John turned and pulled up the diagnostics on the HUD for Zelenka.

Zelenka’s voice was muffled as he spoke into the mess of wires and crystals above his head. “Do not lie to me, Major. Atlantis always chooses you first.”

“She’s not real!” John snapped. “It’s not real.” He squeezed the back of his neck. “Jesus.” 

“So twenty-three of us are imagining the same thing?”

“That’s not what I said.”

Zelenka snorted. 

“Besides, I don’t really see anything. It’s more, I don’t know, just a feeling. Like something inside your skin that you can’t get out.” If he wanted it out at all, and maybe the only thing that made him want it gone was the possibility that he didn’t. 

John looks at Yaxley, then Carson. Carson throws up his hands. “Look, Colonel, the men talk. Probably Yaxley overheard something, and next thing you know, he’s seeing things.

“Shucks, Carson,” John says. “You’re just jealous because you never see anything yourself.”

+++

They don’t make it to either of their quarters. 

“Christ, Sheppard,” Rodney says. His breath hitches in a way that John wants to hear again. Soon. Now. “I don’t think this is what Carson meant when he said to take it easy for the next day.”

John’s hands fist in Rodney’s blue-grey jacket, and he would yank it apart, tear it at the seams or rip outward from the mysterious worn spot on the left front side, but the material’s too strong. So he shoves it to the side, almost off Rodney’s shoulders and the t-shirt underneath is thinner. Through it, he can feel the heat of skin, the hard-soft of Rodney’s nipples, and his right hand slides up, up, and curves around the thin flesh of Rodney’s neck. There’s moisture in the hollow at the base of his neck, and John bends, drags his lower lip upwards against it, tastes salt and something else. Maybe it’s Rodney himself; maybe it’s Atlantis’s mark on him. He buries his hands deep inside her – repairs, maintenance, he insists – and then he comes away with her on him. He rubs his arm, rests his chin in his hand, scratches the base of his throat with her.

John’s mouth runs into his hand spread wide around Rodney’s neck. He licks his own thumb, right where it finds the quickening pulse under Rodney’s skin. If he lifts his thumb from Rodney and presses it against his tongue, he can feel his own blood thrumming in his mouth. It doesn’t beat in time with the rhythm of Rodney’s body.

One of Rodney’s hands rubs against John’s pants, the outside of them, finds his cock. The other slips under the bottom of his shirt where it falls onto the small of John’s back, dips down the back of his pants. His fingers are blunt, squarish at the ends. They dig into John, hard enough to leave bruises, hard enough to make John tighten his hand on Rodney’s throat.

Rodney squeezes him lightly. “Is this some kind of life-affirming sex?”

“What? No.” He cants his hips, seeking more. 

“Celebratory sex for your promotion to Lieutenant Colonel?”

John wonders how hard he’d have to grip Rodney’s throat in order to get him to make that quiet hitching sound again. “That was over two months ago, McKay.”

Rodney hums a bit – it vibrates under John’s hand – and begins moving his hand more, not enough.

“Welcome back to Atlantis sex?”

“Weeks ago,” John answers, and “Good,” Rodney says. 

John curls his fingers more into his throat, vulnerable, and Rodney narrows his eyes and doesn’t swallow because maybe he can’t or maybe – probably – he doesn’t want to give John the satisfaction, and it’s not like John was convinced he should celebrate coming back to the city. Sure, it’s the city and Atlantis, but he was never obsessed with the idea the way McKay and the scientists and Elizabeth are; it was never Atlantis to him. Maybe it’s home now, but if he’d died during the Wraith siege, blown up with McKay’s bomb, he wouldn’t have died to protect Atlantis. Or he would have, but only as far as protecting Atlantis meant protecting Earth. 

Because when he stepped back through the wormhole to Earth, there was this curious pressure in his chest. The instant of the trip, a process always so painless, during which you are completely unaware of self, surrounding, time and space, molecules and energy, feeling – it wasn’t that way this time. He knew all the billions of billions of light years that one instant took him from Atlantis, and that instant lasted each one of those billions of years, and in every one, something grew thinner or perhaps more brittle. Something clinging that didn’t want to let go and yet couldn’t hang on. The next second, when he found himself in SGC, there was something gone that he didn’t know he’d had. It was a reprieve in the way an unexpected gift is a small shout of joy, something that leaves you lighter. 

He even thought, as he ran the circuit of a large park he’d found a few miles from base, that he might not go back. In, one two three, out, one two three, in, one two three, he ran. The blacktop was silent, no whisper of machinery, no faint rattle of metal pounded by his footsteps. The next morning, he woke up with an intense ache buried deep in the front of his legs. Shin splints, he thought, from the unfamiliar surface. 

He had shin splints the entire time he was on earth, and not just in his shins. His forearms ached, too. Temporary nerve damage from battling the Wraith for Atlantis, the doctor at SGC told him, except that it didn’t feel like it was in his nerves, but deeper than that. 

McKay unzips his pants. John’s cock tries to rise into the V created by the parted flaps of his pants, but his boxers still trap it. Rodney’s finger seeks out the slit in the fabric. John jolts forward, his hips stuttering, his hands clenching, a tiny noise escaping him, helpless, demanding, and it almost, almost covers the choked gasp that Rodney makes under John’s hand on his throat as he cuts off his air. 

He stares at Rodney. Rodney stares back, and John lets go. He didn’t mean – he didn’t know he was going to do that, and now that he has, there’s something fierce and sharp inside him. 

“Bastard.” Rodney’s voice is slightly hoarse. 

The warm pressure on John’s cock disappears, and when he looks down, he sees Rodney’s hand shoved down his own pants, too impatient even to undo them, and it’s moving, and John makes another noise and says, “Christ, McKay, just blow me already.”

Rodney lifts his hand to John’s face and smears a drop of precome across his cheek, just to the corner of his mouth. “You’ll owe me,” he says. 

His mouth is hot. 

+++

The smell of PX9-237 reaches them before they see the grey smoke twisting into the sun, flirting with itself, twining up its invisible ladder. The sky is blue the way steel cools, hard, bright, ready to slice their eyes if the sun doesn’t blind them first. John blinks up behind his aviator glasses. The backs of his eyelids wash yellow, red-yellow, shifting black spots dizzying him. When he opens his eyes, he sees only more yellow and for a moment, he thinks he didn’t open them at all.

McKay’s muttering things about desertification and the possibility of an advanced society. “How could netov seeds grow here?” he wants to know.

John looks to his right, to his left, at the endless yellow. It’s not all sand. Mostly there’s brown-gold rock covered by a thin layer of sand, but it’s uneven terrain. What seems to be solid stone will shift into mounds of sand that seem to come right from the pyramids, and when the wind blows dry and hot, their footsteps disappear. 

“Do you smell that?” Teyla’s nose wrinkles. “It is … unpleasant.” 

There are things in the sand, revealed as the wind changes the landscape. Dead white tree limbs, bones. 

“I have smelled it somewhere before,” she says.

John squats next to a messy pile of white. Yellow-white, because it seems that everything on this world is shaded over by yellow. He looks at Ronon. “Human?” 

“Could have been fed on by Wraith, left,” says Ronon. There’s no flesh left on the broken skeleton, no way to tell. 

“Maybe.” Maybe not.

“I think—” Teyla stops herself. “I could be mistaken, but I believe that I am smelling human flesh burning.”

John is still looking at the bones. It seems like there’s something traced on them, very faint. He can’t make it out. 

He’s the last to hear the screams.

+++

There are currents running through the hallways of Atlantis. Not deadly, not like they were two days ago when the storm hit, but enough to tingle, to make John’s palms itch. Tension skitters up and down his spine. McKay insists that everything’s fine, that he can’t feel anything, that the grounding stations are working normally. 

It’s a quiet night in the city. The scientists are off doing their science-y things; the skeletal cooking and cleaning staff they brought along has finished wiping down the mess; most of the marines are down on the lower level of the east wing. 

John knows what goes on down there, but he hasn’t been. Until now.

“Sir,” Bates greets him. He salutes and grins a cocky grin at him. He nudges Jaffe next to him. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

John smiles back, teeth sharp. 

They’re all standing in a loosely formed circle, irregular, knocking elbows. John spots more than one non-military face – the guy who fries the not-eggs in the morning, the lady who cleans the gateroom. The little Japanese scientist who seems to be equal parts scared of and in love with McKay, and who, according to Ford, has a mean left kick. Grodin. Beckett’s assistant, Dr. What’s-his-face. Others, and more marines that John knew this place had. They’re never all in the same place together, except on paper. 

The two men in the center of the circle look like they’ve been going at it for a while. A quick jab to the jaw, another deep in the gut, and one of them stumbles, falls to the floor, and the other’s on him in an instant, pulling his arms behind him until the other gives and calls out to stop. Across the ring, Ford stares at John and yells something that could be “knew you couldn’t stay away, sir,” if John could hear him above the shouting crowd, because when the men saw him standing there, they got even louder.

Bates tips his head. “Ready, sir?”

John raises his eyebrows.

An unrepentant shrug from Bates. “First night here, gotta fight. You know how it goes.”

John pulls some marine he doesn’t know, “Name’s Khoury, sir,” the man says as John eyes him. He’s got thirty pounds on John, easy. He’s going to wipe the mats with John’s ass. John rolls his shoulders back and grins at Khoury.

Maybe it’s five or maybe it’s ten minutes later, or hell, maybe it’s not even that, but John’s ears are ringing from the blows he’s taken and his knuckles are scraped and bleeding from trading them back. Flashes of white catch his eye, people trading bets and IOUs, and everything seems to be in slow motion. He shakes his head and sees red sweat, blood go flying, drop by drop. His mouth tastes metallic, and all he can hear are the cheers of the crowd. He ducks and tumbles the way Teyla’s taught him, comes at Khoury from the other side, and the marine laughs, and John knows he’s going down, down hard, but not before he gets in a few good punches. 

Under his feet, Atlantis shivers with electricity and gives him energy, the vibrancy to move his exhausted battered body one last time before he’s on his back on the mat. He knows that this section of the city is on top of not only the desalinization tanks, but also the machines that run the environmental controls, and that those must be the vibrations he feels, but he can’t help but think that if the city were sentient, it’d be alive and laughing with all the energy and sweat and blood of the men. More than it’s seen in tens of thousands of years, because John’s willing to bet that those Ancients bent on Ascending didn’t exactly rock the house down. 

Every blow that he gives and receives takes John a bit out of his body, breaks him into pieces, and Christ, this was a bad idea, because he’s been coming apart since he stepped into this city, since he killed his CO, and he can’t fall apart now, not here. “Stop,” he says, whacking Khoury on the shoulder, and he’s happy to see that Khoury’s face is doing its own share of bleeding. 

“Ah, Jesus,” he groans, and clutches his side and spits out blood. 

“Yes, sir,” Khoury says. He hauls himself up, not without his own wince, and offers a hand to John. Someone slaps John on the back, congratulating him, and John nearly topples over. But around him, in the faces of the men, he sees something else – the same thing that he’s thinking, this feeling of being broken down by this place, like nothing basic training ever managed to do to any of them, by everything they’ve found and didn’t expect to, by the weight of the knowledge that they may never get back to Earth, back home, and he realizes what this is all about, why he came down here tonight with Atlantis’s lightning currents coursing through his skin. They’re making this place theirs, and it’s not about winning or losing, but doing something more than just surviving, living, and John – these are John’s marines now. Not the marines, the men, but his men. 

Teyla hands him a moist cloth. 

“Hey, Teyla,” he says. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Major Sheppard.” She lifts one slim shoulder. “I had to see what this was about. If this was some Earth custom. I was afraid,” she says, “that this was some strange evil brought from your home. In all the worlds I have seen, the peoples I have known, I have never encountered a world such as you tell me your Earth is. Where there are so many people and so little fear that you will destroy yourselves in civil wars, in these world wars, as you call them. Here, we cannot afford such waste.”

John wipes down his neck. Sweat drips down his back under his black shirt. 

“You fight?”

“Several weeks ago.” Her satisfied look says it all. “But it seems that boys will be boys everywhere. I have been to several planets where I have seen similar entertainment.”

“It’s not just about that,” John tells her, as if he’s known this for more than five minutes.

“No, it’s not,” she says. There is something like sorrow in her voice, not for herself perhaps, but for them. Right there, right in the middle of the adrenalin-driven mass, she reaches up and places her hands on his shoulders. She is heedless of the sweat and grime on John’s forehead as he presses it to hers.

+++

John’s not sure how he finds them. He didn’t mean to. He was just thinking about McKay. 

“Bet he’s freaking out, sir,” Ford said. “Thinking he was going to die and all. Watching his scientists die. Just when the city begins to feel like home, it goes and throws a curveball at you. Nanites, goddamn.”

Elizabeth will organize some sort of memorial for them, Dumais, Wagner, Johnson, Hayes. But in the meantime, there’s not a scientist to be found. The labs are empty. John doesn’t really need to know where they are, except that something pushes him to find out anyway. Maybe it’s an effect of having seeing the city self-quarantine, close off hallways and access, shut him out. It’s unnerving, having the city just take over. He wonders if it’s possible that there’s some sort of AI built into the city, if it’s possible that it has its own form of intelligence. He makes a mental note to have McKay and Zelenka check into it, if they haven’t already. Unlikely, because it was probably the first thing McKay did. 

So he takes a walk through the city now that he can once more, and all he does is take the path of least resistance, the one with the fewest doors and most well-lit spaces, and suddenly McKay’s standing in front of him, snickering. His eyes are bloodshot. Through the open door behind him, John can see scientists still in their blue and tan uniforms, hear them talking, arguing, laughing. The scene has a manic quality to it.

“Nuh-uh,” McKay says. He waggles his finger in John’s face and grabs his arm. “No majors allowed in.” He sways, an oddly graceful motion, the kind men only make when they’re drunk or high or very good dancers. 

“Hey,” he says, as if just seeing John for the first time. “How’d you find us anyway? I rewired Atlantis’s locking system to cut off this part of the city until I reset it.”

“And did you do that before or after you snorted the happy juice, McKay?” 

“Before.” His ‘duh’ is implied.

“Yeah. Okay, listen.” John slings his arm around him. He can do this to McKay. “What’s going on here?”

McKay glares and suddenly seems a whole lot less high. “Don’t try to charm me, Major. We’re having a wake.”

Someone John doesn’t recognizes walks by. McKay grabs the joint from her hand. 

“Pot?” John says.

McKay smirks. “Better. Native to Pegasus.”

“Didn’t take you for the type.”

“I’m not.” McKay shrugs. 

“Neither am I.” Not now. He can’t afford to be, can’t afford to lose control.

“Wasn’t offering.”

All of which explains how the botanists and biologists always manage to pay their debts so promptly. Why people are so willing to help them out.

There’s an unspoken conversation going on here as well. McKay says, without speaking at all, ‘You going to tell Elizabeth?’ and John replies, equally silently, ‘You think she doesn’t already know?’ and he smirks back at McKay. 

+++

“It’s a gene,” Carson tells him. “Look, we don’t know exactly how it works, but when it comes down to it, it’s your body doing the work.”

John sits up and swings his legs over the side of the infirmary bed. “But there’s a mental component to a lot of the Ancient stuff.”

McKay rolls his eyes. “That doesn’t mean you’re talking to it when you think ‘on’ at it. That’s just the mental expression of your body interfacing with the tech. Oh my god, please tell me you don’t believe the city talks back to you.”

“No.” John frowns at him. “I’m not nuts.” But they’re not entirely right, either. Because there’s something going on with the city that they’re missing. Some vitality to it that they can’t see. Because, yes, it is about body, not mind. Like Carson says, it’s a gene, a piece of his body, and it lets John know it’s there first through the soles of his feet, the palms of his hands, then the chill and heat and ache of his bones. 

+++

When John walks the halls of the city after Beckett releases him, after his blue scales have fallen off, after his yellow eyes have gone hazel again, something’s changed. The marines have a different air about them now, ever so slightly, not something obvious unless looked for. John’s looking. It may be the Pegasus galaxy, but seeing your CO turned into a giant bug is still outside the norm. He needs to make sure his command hasn’t been undermined, that the city’s still his. 

It’s subtle, a twist of their shoulders, the flicker of their eyes. Something else he can’t put his finger on, and the weirdest thing is that it doesn’t seem to be directed at him. 

A week later, he ends up in Ronon’s quarters for a movie night. John gave him Ford’s TV a month after he joined the team. 

“I’m just pointing out,” Rodney says, “how stupid that is. I can’t believe it. I mean, there’s idiotic and there’s idiotic. And this is beyond either of them.”

Teyla slides the DVD in. “Is it not true that the marines are here to protect the scientists? Rather than the reverse. When you save their lives, as, yes, you have done on many occasions—” Ronon rolls his eyes at John, and John grins – “this is something they are not accustomed to and therefore perhaps they do not value it as you feel they should. But the incident on Duranda, that is something they understand.”

“Explosions,” Rodney mutters. 

Ronon shrugs. “Soldiers understand force, McKay. They respect it, going ahead like that.”

“Because they’re stupid! What happened to military tactics and all that?”

“McKay,” John says. He’s lazy, his leg tossed over the arm of a chair. “We like plans and maneuvers as much as anyone. More.”

But that’s what it is. McKay’s scientists have always respected him, sometimes cowered before him. They cry not when he’s furious, but when he’s disappointed in them. Anyone who’s spent time with him knows that they don’t want to piss McKay off – he controls too much of the city and he’s not afraid to let people know it. John’s the only one who can simply sidestep his command over the workings of the city, and that’s just because of the gene. 

The marines, though, the ones who know him mostly by reputation and sight in the mess – they see strength in McKay’s actions on Duranda, not the failure that McKay sees. It’s big, it’s loud, it’s bright, and John has every confidence in the brains of his soldiers, no dumb grunts coming through that gate, but maybe John feels it too. Even through his lingering anger at McKay. McKay’s shelter of theory has been ripped away by gale-force winds, and he’s hanging out there from the edge just like the rest of them, because this is the real world, not labwork, and when he fails, men die. 

Not in spite of him, but because of him. 

It’s something about trust.

+++

Not long before they lose Dumais to the nanites, John has a conversation with Elizabeth about what happened on the planet with the destroyed Wraith cruiser and the 10,000 year old super-Wraith. 

She shakes her head. “It’s quite a shame about Gall. He had a lot of promise. I worked with him in Antarctica.” 

Below them, the gateroom is empty but for Grodin and the rest of the control tower staff monitoring the equipment. It’s a quiet day. The doors to her office are open.

John speaks quietly. “We lost Abrams as well.”

Elizabeth folds her hands. “We had a number of complaints about him. I don’t think he was fitting in very well here. But,” she says, very formally, “he will be missed.”

“I don’t leave men behind, Elizabeth.” 

She nods. “We can’t afford to lose anyone. We don’t have a way to replace them. We need everyone alive. And” – she unfolds her hands – “not too badly injured, please. If there were to be a rash of medical incidents, particularly off-duty ones, I’d have to investigate.” She pauses. John slouches against the wall. “Of course, minor bruises and the like aren’t anything to worry about. They’re expected.” 

And as long as she has no official knowledge of anything, John’s the fall guy. There’s a warped part of him that respects that. The first day of 7th grade, John had Social Studies third period. When they walked into class with their clean spiral notebooks, wide-ruled, the teacher told them to copy down onto the first page the sentence on the board. He still has that piece of paper, somewhere. Knowledge is power, it says. 

“John,” she says. “You can’t save everyone.”

John gives her a lazy salute, mocking himself more than her. 

That night, McKay fucks him into the mattress. He spreads his legs wide and goes down on his elbows and knees, and through the window he sees the lights of the city, golden in the blackness of the sea. 

When they’re through, he cleans himself up and leaves. “Thanks,” and “You’re welcome,” he throws over his shoulder on the way out. He figures they’re even on this one. McKay grunts something as the door slides shut.

+++

People get used to the symmetry of the city. Ford wasn’t the only one to see it, to mention it. Some like it, like the way they can walk down a hallway and know that the rooms on either side will be the same. The way their windows match and the patterns on the floor can be flip-flopped. It creates an easy rhythm to the city, something steady like the wash of the waves against its piers. There’s a comfort, something not alien, in the constancy. 

Not everyone feels that way. Some things can be too perfect, or try too hard to be perfect. John knows the city isn’t perfect, and as time passes, it becomes more obvious that neither were the Ancients. Maybe the symmetry was their way of trying to hide that from themselves. 

Thing is – John’s on to them. He practices with Teyla in the weird orange glow of the padded gym, and he sees her sticks coming at him, and yet his eye is drawn to the design panels filled with orange glass. 

Right arm up, bantos rod at 45 degree angle, left foot back, twist, tumble, “rgh!” and, “Do you have to hit so hard?” He turns his head and there, there are four large panels with their metallic overlay like geometric lace, each panel divided into one, two, three, fourteen mini-pieces. Except the third one of the four, lower left corner. There are fifteen mini-panels in that one. 

He glances at Teyla. She waits for him to rise. 

He ducks. Then up, right, left, right, two steps over, back up, back up, drive forward, and out, he’s on his ass again, staring up at the ceiling. Where there are twelve rows of lights, six individual lights in each row, except there, the ninth row. There are only five lights in that row. 

“Do you see that?” he says.

“See what?”

“Never mind.”

“Look,” McKay says sometime later. Hours, days, maybe weeks – doesn’t matter. “I’ve checked three times. I’ve run every program and diagnostic I can find. I made Carson sit in that chair for hours. Zelenka made me sit in the chair and he checked everything I checked. I’ve been in the labs, in the control tower, in parts of the city you don’t even know exist. I can’t find a thing. Face it, Sheppard. You’re wrong. There is no artificial intelligence to Atlantis. It has good technology and good programming, but no sentience. It can’t think for itself, and it can’t think for you. The only thing it can do is respond to your gene, and that means you’re controlling it.”

“Aww, Rodney, you sound like you don’t love her.” John fiddles with a marker and leans back against the lab table. He lines his boot up with McKay’s, parallel but backwards. 

“That’s what I mean,” McKay says. He snatches the marker back from John. “Gimme that. It’s an it, not a she. When did you start calling it her?”

John picks up another one and fills in the next step on the proof lying on the pad of paper next to Rodney’s laptop. Then he draws some stick figures around it, just because he can. He adds some hair and the spires of the city.

“I was going to finish that!” Rodney looks over his shoulder. “Oh, for heaven’s – what are those?”

“Later, McKay.”

+++

They make a deal with the leader of the settlement they find on PX9-237 for netov seeds. They negotiate for them at the festival. The council members refuse to go anywhere else. Behind John, seven men and two women burn. Three are still alive. 

“Are we sure we want to be trading with these people?” McKay says. 

Teyla tips her head to the side. “I, too, am uncomfortable, but we have become lazy since the Daedalus began bringing supplies from Earth. It may not be here forever. We must ensure a steady supply of food, and the netov seeds are excellent for making bread.”

John squints into the desert sky and tries not to breathe in too deeply. All he can smell is the stench of burning human flesh; all he can hear are the screams twenty feet away. The relentless sun nails spikes into his temples.

“They are all fairly represented in the Tribunal before being condemned,” Rishiv assures them. 

“Not condemned, Rishiv,” Xanje interrupts. They lead the council. “Chosen.”

Rishiv waves his hand. “I’m a reasonable man, Colonel,” he says to John. “A man of science, not faith. To me, these people are criminals. To the citizens, well, we need rain – it has been three sun-cycles – and if it satisfies the gods, perhaps that’s its own science. You will understand, Dr. McKay, yes?”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Rodney says, and John hopes he’s the only one who hears. 

“We will add their names to the lists of the dead for remembrance. You are welcome to stay for the ceremony.”

“Thanks, but no,” says John. 

It’s late afternoon when they leave the town. John can feel the endless yellow sand in his boots. For a minute, he’s back in Afghanistan, rocky brown earth and sand, ropey mountains in the distance, that damned sun everywhere, smell of goats and piss and freshly baked bread stuck forever in his nostrils. But there’s no biting wind trying to take chunks out of any piece of exposed body it can find, no whine and thunder of choppers overhead, and no scent of bread to be found. 

The screams have ceased. As they walk away, the village council begins to read the names of the dead. Name after name after name. It becomes a drone, unceasing, and maybe it’s just the angle of the sun now, but he can see the bones better where they poke out of the sand. Many are bleached white-yellow, and yet surely there’s something etched into them. Something branded so far below the surface that only the constant sun and wind and time can expose their secrets.

John walks on. His legs ache, and his fingers creak. On his bones, he knows, there is Ancient script. It’s carved into them now, cut with every step he takes on Atlantis. 

A bird screeches overhead. Its wingspan passes a shadow across John’s face.

+++

“The stars are different here.”

Rodney looks at him like he’s a moron. “Different planet and all that.”

John shakes his head. “Doesn’t that seem wrong? Every time we have a mission, we go somewhere where the stars are different. I just – they should be the same when we’re in the city. Even if we did fly the city halfway across the galaxy.”

John gets up, naked, and goes to stand by his window. He wraps his arms about himself, cold. Sometimes he only knows that he’s on a different planet when it’s dark, when he can see the stars. “Do you ever even look at them? Shouldn’t you? You’re an astrophysicist.”

“Theoretical.” McKay watches him from the bed. 

“Sheppard,” he says impatiently. “Are you coming over here, or you want me to leave? I’ve got work to do. Carter wants me to recalibrate the internal sensors. You want me to change all the entry codes for every level that Elizabeth had any access to, just in case she goes all Replicator-evil. Which would be just about everything in the city, and incidentally, we’ve already done it twice, except that the controls were set at level seven the last time I messed around in there, and Lucas is claiming that now they’re set at level five, which is way below where they should be, and he swears he didn’t do it and no one’s touched them since I did. Plus, I owe Zelenka, and I think he’s going to make me train the new scientists all day tomorrow in payment.” 

John knows what he means. He’s been trying to get to his own new men for a week now. He still doesn’t know all their names, or rather, he knows their names but can’t match them properly to faces. There’s Saunders, who he thinks is the blonde kid. Vegas is on the short side, and John’ll be hanged if he can tell which one is Hitzig and which is Morgenstern. 

Rodney sits up and drags the sheet around his waist. He’s nude, otherwise. John looks at his feet. He follows the line of their arch upward with his eyes. He’s never had them in his mouth. McKay walked across the floor with them, bare. Atlantis must linger on them. 

McKay takes a breath and babbles on. “Miko’s telling me that no matter how many times she runs her latest simulations and no matter how many times they work out perfectly, when she goes to input the data into the city’s systems, Atlantis rejects it every time. Keller insists that I’ve got to get at least seven hours of sleep at least twice a week , and she’s scarier than Carson ever was, and she still wants me to look at the bone-setting machine in the infirmary because it won’t work even though there’s nothing wrong with it that she, Simpson, or even Radek can find.”

John comes over and sits on the floor, and takes one of Rodney’s feet in his hand. He brings it to his face. “Carson was the most terrifying person on Atlantis. Hands down.” He licks a stripe on the underside of Rodney’s foot. It twitches in his hand.

“That’s disgusting.” McKay makes no move to yank his foot away. He places his other foot on John’s shoulder, where the neck curves down. His big toe rests just below John’s ear.

“Mmm.” John nips the fleshy pad of a toe. 

“You’re a freak.”

John smiles up at him, not quite nicely. “Yup.” His cock, which had been mostly limp while they talked, begins to fill again. He can see the outline of Rodney’s under the sheet, rising up. He knows that if he moves the sheet, Rodney will be thick and flushed. He wants to – he wants to – he wants—

Rodney’s been trying to take him apart for hours now. Trying to make him give it up, to wrest from him that one last bit of control that he never releases. He can’t, and just as much he can’t see how Rodney fails to understand this. If he lets it go, lets himself go, he’s not sure what will be left. He’s so close, but –

“Rodney,” he says, and he bites into the tendon of his foot, and “Jesus!” Rodney shrieks, and his cock pulses, his and Rodney’s too. 

Rodney’s foot on his neck nudges his shoulder bone. It feels raw where it rubs the flesh every time he touches Rodney and makes him jolt. Today he is brittle, all thin flesh and glass skeleton, as if something vital has been taken from him, withdrawn, as if he has forsaken something that kept him standing upright. He’s more comfortable sitting here at Rodney’s feet, and he would stay here, but he can’t. 

He looks over his shoulder, back at nothing, back at the wall, hasty, as if something’s behind him. His radio crackles in his ear, and with a curse he yanks it off before he can hear anything. McKay mouths something above him. John doesn’t see what it is. 

Because here, in this galaxy, John has left men behind. Lost them in his own city, and he’s sorry, so goddamn sorry about Ford even years later. Taken under, over by the enzyme, and in retrospect, maybe it was a little too easy. He saw McKay on that same junk and Teyla and Ronon, and they all came out of it, not left behind, not willing to go. He wonders, sometimes, if there was something else going on with Ford, if the pressures of the city made hairline fractures throughout his body before he ever touched that Wraith. Aiden always wanted everything to be so clear-cut, so symmetrical. 

John’s left men behind and he’s had men under his command die in spite of him, in spite of his best efforts, and because of them. It’s one of those things that’s so easy to see in others, but impossible to see about oneself. He didn’t learn this lesson from Rodney. It’s something he should have learned a year and a half before, the day he shot his CO. Exploding five-sixths of a solar system had taught Rodney about men dying because of him, but John – men die for John. 

What kind of man do other men die for? Walker, Stevens walking into that iratus-filled cave for him. Men, they die for their wives and children, parents and sisters and brothers, for their country, for their gods. None of those things are here. 

Or if they are, they all are, every single one of them bound up together in one thing, and that – John knows what that is. 

Perhaps Rodney senses the edge he’s been sharpened into, the way his bones are jutting from out his skin. His hand touches John’s head before he orders John to suck him. 

John’s laugh is ragged. “I’m not a—” He stops. He doesn’t know what he was going to say. 

“You can’t save everyone, Sheppard,” Rodney tells him. His cock is half-hard in front of John’s face. “Not everyone wants to be saved, and some people, maybe they’re saved even if it doesn’t seem like it at first. Carson, Elizabeth. You never know in this place.”

John rises onto his knees and opens his mouth around Rodney’s dick. The city’s hard floor makes his knees ache. 

“Jesus,” Rodney says. His voice cracks. “Why can’t you just give in already?”

Drops of sweat from John’s forehead splash Rodney’s skin.

+++

Sometimes late at night when John’s sleeping, when he’s forgotten to take the radio out of his ear before tumbling into bed, he wakes to the sound of a voice. Not someone chatting, not regular communications, but single words, sighed and passed around as if secret. The kinds of things that when listened for yield only static. 

He doesn’t recognize the voice. 

+++

There’s a handful of summers, childhood summers, that John spent in the Blue Ridge in Tennessee. Not the whole summer, but part, and twice he came back in the fall when the colors peaked. He didn’t care about that, not at nine years old, but he and Uncle Andy raked huge piles of leaves, red leaves, orange leaves, yellow leaves, and then he ran, not in, one two three, out, one two three, the measured way he runs now, but a child’s flailing leap and dive. 

Down there, the farther away you look, the more blue the mountains become. Auntie Georgie told him that if he stood with his arms out and swayed back and forth, the mountains would become the ocean, waves endlessly chasing one another. 

“Johnny, you stay and be good for your great aunt,” his mother would say, and he would nod and let her press a soft kiss to the side of his mouth before she did the same thing to his brother. Then he’d stand on the big wooden porch and wave her goodbye, while Uncle Andy rocked back and forth in his chair and puffed on his pipe. 

The first day was always the best. There were woods to run through with his brother, insects to poke, butterflies to catch in mesh nets, flipped-over trees with stumps torn out of the ground, so big that he could stand straight and tall, just like Dad taught him to, and still hide completely. Streams with mossy rocks to jump across. Gnarled old trees to climb so high that the branches creaked and bent under his feet. And in the evening, Uncle Andy’s neighbor would come over with his fiddle, and they’d sit on the wide porch and listen to Uncle Andy and Mr. Billy fight it out on their fiddles. It was the kind of music that you tapped your foot to or clapped to, mountain music, fast and wild and untamed, and John loved every second of it. 

When the Ancients return and kick them out, back to Earth, there’s a message waiting for John. Auntie Georgie’s dead. The message is eight months old but it only just got to the SGC. Uncle Andy died almost twenty years ago. 

There are times off-world when he looks to the horizon, looks for blue mountains and ocean waves, or hills crashing into the sun and bursting into all the colors of fire. Sometimes just before they go off-world, he chokes on the confinement of the city, all that thin silver-grey metal and dull brick-red décor. Sometimes by the end of the mission, especially a long one, he can’t breathe at all.

He stumbles back through the gate and the vise on his throat eases. He wants to laugh with the sweetness of the air he drags in. In the infirmary, standard post-mission checkup, Carson examines him and says, “Colonel, do you ever think the city, she—” He stops, embarrassed. John pats him on the shoulder.

McKay doesn’t understand what John means, the one time John mentions it. But John doesn’t try very hard to explain. They don’t have that kind of relationship. 

“Show me,” McKay says, instead, because that’s the way he is, because he has to know everything.

John stares at him, hard. “It’s not pleasant.” It’s like staring at the sun too long, a burn behind the eyes, black spots dancing, this fire spreading down into the lungs as they struggle in vain for air, summer in Afghanistan, pulling 9 g’s in a firefight. It’s not exactly unpleasant, either.

Rodney closes the lip of his laptop and walks out of the lab. It’s empty anyway, but here is not the place. 

They do it in John’s room. John hates doing it, anything, in his room. John’s mother taught him to stand, to mouth polite nothings, “We’ll have to do this again sometime,” to take steps toward the door. This is how to get a guest to leave. But he never expected it to work with Rodney, and no surprise, it never does. Rodney won’t leave until he wants to leave, on his terms. And maybe Rodney can’t turn the city against him, can’t rewire her to slam doors in his face when down in the bowels of the city, can’t reprogram her to leak oxygen out and carbon monoxide in, can’t make her override John’s navigation systems in the jumpers in favor of Rodney’s – maybe Rodney doesn’t have the power to take that final step against him, but he can do everything except that. 

They both know it. John thinks they’ve built everything they have around it. He’s the only person on Atlantis that Rodney can’t touch, because the city won’t let him. She loves John. It doesn’t matter that Rodney doesn’t actually go around doing these things. It’s about the ability to do them if he wanted, the belief others hold that he would. Debts and bets to the physics team are swiftly paid. 

It took John sixty Genii lives to get to the same place. And it isn’t just that, like his dad said during ‘Nam, “No one respects the military anymore, son. Especially not that damned pansy-ass chairforce.” One storm and one raised shield later, point to the Air Force, baby. 

He’s had McKay’s throat under his hands before. Under his fingers, lips, tongue. He makes Rodney take his shirt off, pushes his pants down around his ankles, ungainly. He strokes Rodney’s cock, and he can’t help it – it’s as though he’s touching himself. It’s just habit, he knows, this response his own body forces on him every time he lays so much as a finger on McKay. 

He caresses Rodney’s windpipe, but doesn’t do anything beyond that until Rodney’s just about to come as he jacks him off. There’s something low in his gut, something curling up like so much smoke blacking out the sun when he presses his thumb slowly, inexorably, into Rodney’s neck. 

Rodney’s eyes fly open, wide. John smiles at him, careless. Twenty seconds, thirty, almost a minute, and now Rodney’s going from sex-flushed to red, unhappy sweat dripping down his face, onto John’s hand, and he tries to shake his head, to claw away John’s fingers. John won’t let him, because he’s got Rodney here, now, helpless before him, and it feels so damn good. He holds on, waits till Rodney’s eyelids flutter on the verge of a blackout, and wonders why everything in front of his own eyes – the city’s wall, the sheets, Rodney, Rodney – is flashing yellow-black, why his own chest is ready to explode under too much pressure, why he can’t breathe, can’t fucking breathe, and then he lets go. 

“Shit, Sheppard.” Rodney’s bent over, hands on knees, hacking. “You could have killed me,” and John doesn’t say anything, just watches him, because no, he couldn’t have. Rodney stole his victory from him by agreeing before they even began, just as always. 

Rodney studies him. “You were one of those weird nature people on Earth, weren’t you? Probably used your leave to go hiking in mountains or skiing. We already know about the surfing.” His voice is gritty. He sprawls naked, unconcerned. John always puts his clothes back on, or at least boxers, after they’re through. 

He shrugs. “I like being outside.”

“The city traps you.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Please. You’re so emo about it that you tried to choke me to death. You can’t wait to get off-world, go tromping through alien woods – don’t think I don’t know what’s behind your refusal to take the jumper closer than five kilometers to a village. Security, my ass. And then you can’t wait to come back here. Separation anxiety. You angst, Sheppard.” He snorts.

But, see, the thing is this. Sometimes when John goes off-world, looking to the curve of the world, any world, for those smoky mountains and burning forests, he finds them.

+++

When people don’t know what to do, they have meetings. Because this is Atlantis and the civilian-run expedition is heavily influenced by the military – they are at war – the meetings are called briefings. 

They have a lot of briefings when they find out that three Wraith hive ships are bearing down on them. John steals McKay’s tablet and doodles on it. 

“They must not be allowed to get to Earth,” Elizabeth says. 

“What are you going to do, blow up the city?” Ford asks. “Are we willing to do that?”

John glances up. He thinks of blue mountains, mist rising off them in the morning, slow Tennessee voices and wild fingers dancing on fiddles. “Hell, yeah.”

“I’m surprised to hear you agree so quickly, Major.” McKay grabs back his laptop. “Atlantis’s favored son? The city bends over backwards for you, and you’re so eager to abandon it?”

John leans back in his chair. “You make it sound like it’s alive. You told me yourself it’s not. Make no mistake, McKay, we’re going to go down fighting. But Earth comes first.”

+++

McKay won’t let him come. 

“Ah-ah,” he says, annoyingly, when John tries to touch his own dick. Rodney keeps typing away on his keyboard. John wants to hit him. 

He stands there before Rodney with his pants undone and his cock standing out of his boxers. His balls are still tucked back behind the cloth, but he can feel them hanging heavy between his legs. He feels ridiculous, and shouldn’t that be enough to lessen this torment? It’s not. 

His hands are chilly; all his blood is pooled in his groin. Rodney swivels on his chair and scratches his fingers up the inside of John’s thigh. Every muscle he has clenches. His cock strains forward. His entire body suffers fine tremors, quivering want.

Rodney swirled his tongue around the tip of his cock as though it were a cherry in his mouth. He licked the fat vein running up it and then blew cool air on him, and John shuddered. His hands fisted in the air at his sides and released. The clock ticked on silently. Rodney’s dick burned a streak into his skin, and his hand was a terrible fire squeezing the base of John’s cock just as he was about to come.

“Enough,” he said. He tried to sound commanding, convincing. 

McKay laughed at him. 

“Bend over,” he told him, and John did.

“Spread yourself for me,” and John growled low in his throat and ducked his face away to hide the hot blush of shame on his cheeks, but he spread his legs too.

“Use your hands. Hold yourself open.”

“I’ll fall over,” John warned him, as he exposed himself.

“So rest your torso on the desk.”

Rodney fucked him while John’s hands were behind his back, holding apart his ass cheeks. The edge of the table cut a line into the tops of his thighs, and his cock was mashed into the smooth surface, and it was hard and fast and merciless, and John didn’t come.

When Rodney finished, he cleaned himself up and made John get dressed, all except for his cock hanging out of his pants. John had never felt so exposed in his life. Rodney’s come began to drip down his leg. 

“McKay,” he said, warningly.

Rodney sat down at the desk he’d just fucked John over, and began to work on one of his projects. “Don’t touch yourself,” he tossed over his shoulder. “I’ll know.” 

And when John tries to anyway, Rodney snaps at him even though it seems like he’s not paying any attention. John’s cock remains hard.

McKay won’t let him come, and he’s not about to beg.

+++

When they first arrive on Atlantis, the air is thin and grey and confined. Ten thousand years of stale. Anything, John thinks, even the fierce swirl of Afghani grit so dense that men asphyxiate on it, must be better. 

Full life support coming online and the city’s rising mean fresher air being pumped through the ducts, and yet it’s still dead air to John. He can’t smell anything in it other than colorless dust, skin cells of ten thousand year dead Ancients, detritus of the Ascended.

One morning a month later, he wakes up to the familiar smell of baking bread. Bread being cooked in clay ovens with their own earthy aroma, not the American steel ovens of his childhood. There’s the tingle of sweat mixed in with this bread, unwashed body, garlicky, comfortingly real. It reminds him of Afghanistan, and his fingers twitch to shoot something. He straps on his thigh holster. 

He’s looking forward to fresh rolls with breakfast in the mess, but he can’t find them. People must have been up early today, already eaten them all. Later, he asks McKay how they tasted, and McKay looks at him blankly. 

The next week, it’s the smell of autumn, leaves wet with rain decaying under his feet, rich and dying and more alive than most people ever are. 

He gets that Atlantis responds to his gene. He understands that it’s programmed to turn on lights when he comes around, that it will open doors for him that might otherwise remain shut, that he can activate gadgets designed to be used only by Ancients. There’s enough weird shit going down in this place for this smell thing to be much of the same.

Still, though – “I’m not even in my room,” he says. 

McKay guzzles his coffee. “Did you mean to be? Because – oh, hey – this looks like my lab. What do you want, Major?”

“You asked me to come down here,” he drawls. “Do you smell that?”

“That heavenly scent coming from my mug?”

No, not that. He says suddenly, “Have you ever been in a desert in wintertime? The kind of place where it doesn’t rain for months, just freezes?” That’s what it smells like, the day he went in after his men against orders.

McKay makes a scoffing sound. “Bad enough they sent me to Siberia. At least there you can go sledding, you know, if you’re an utter moron who wants to freeze his balls off. I spent this one winter, the semester break at least, in Berlin right after the wall came down. They had all these flea markets on Sunday mornings where mostly you could buy old stuff from the first world war, like watches and army medallions. And old books. It rained a lot. Useless place.”

“So you had a good time,” John says. One month of this guy, two if you count Antarctica, and he’s learning to speak McKay. 

“What? No.” Then he looks up, smiles a bit lopsidedly. “Good sausage.”

“Yeah.” Unexpected awareness is sharp under John’s ribs. “Listen, McKay, lay off messing with the environmental controls, would you? The men are grumbling. You need them to protect your ass. I’ll get them to play nicer with your scientists.”

“Please. Maybe off-world your marines are useful, but that’s what you’re there for. Because you’re crazy if you think I’m stepping through that gate without you. You’re my life insurance. But in the city? This is going to be my city, Major. Your men,” he points at John, “need me,” he points at himself, “to protect them here.”

John steps forward into his space. McKay doesn’t back down, and mingled with John’s anger at this man’s arrogance is that same bright awareness, cutting, stronger. “Is that a threat, McKay?”

“Not at all. But next time, think before you leap to conclusions. Screwing up the environmental controls is for amateurs. Probably Kavanagh. I’ll talk to him. If you want.”

John narrows his eyes. The black market on Atlantis is already thriving. “How much would it cost me?” Movies, music, cigarettes, porn, booze, drugs. Beckett changes the code to the medical supply closet daily, but it’s not necessary. The smart ones have already figured out that they don’t want to cross him, and the idiots, well, the smart ones have also figured out that life on Atlantis has a way of fixing the idiots.

Sex.

McKay looks John up and down, slowly. John lets his arms fall to his sides, open, displaying, and then he crosses them over his chest, just as deliberately as McKay perused him. 

“Don’t try to take me on, Major.” McKay’s smug. “You’ll lose.”

+++

Except that he doesn’t. 

John sits on his bed and looks at his toe nails. His feet are dirty from the yellow sand that filtered into his boots off-world today. His skins smells like burnt flesh. He needs to cut his nails, but he doesn’t. Instead he squints down at them. There, there on the dead cells growing out of his skin, he sees the writing that he knows is etched into his bones. 

He doesn’t know what it says. Maybe he never will. Centuries from now, Atlantis will be rediscovered. They will find his bones beside one of the jumpers, or in the gateroom with his empty P-90 on top of them, or by a depleted ZPM with other bones, equally yellowed. He will not smell stale, ten thousand years dead, but like myrrh in a dry wind, the ointment of the city’s kisses. His femur will bear her mark, geometric, mathematical, seemingly symmetrical, completely asymmetrical. 

+++

He was wrong. It’s not one voice that haunts his sleep on the forgotten radio. There are many. They flitter in and out at the edges of his consciousness, and he wonders who else hears them. If anyone else hears them at all, or if they can’t hear because they’re all too busy being the ones saying them. 

+++

It’s not something they ever state explicitly. There’s no written plan, no contingency or emergency action detailed. There are no minutes from a briefing that talk of accidentally-on-purpose losing contact with the SGC, no notes jotted down onto a scrap of paper concerning secession. John never talks about it at all, but he knows. It’s just that there are certain lines that none of them are willing to cross, and a few that they are, if necessary. 

Lines in the sand, long and white, and they say “I will not go back to Earth.” This is a line they will not cross. 

Elizabeth’s says, “It’s not home.”

Zelenka’s says, “Hasn’t been, not since I stepped through the gate.”

Carson’s says, “Only if I die, for my Mum.”

Teyla’s says, “I will not allow you to leave,” and Ronon’s echoes, “I kinda like it here.”

Rodney’s says, “Just try and make me. You won’t know what hit you.” His is all trembling determination.

John simply says, “Never again.”

“At any cost,” chants the rest of the expedition, the rest of the city. This is a line they will obliterate with their hundreds of feet strong. 

+++

The skin under John’s wristband is white, paler than the rest. Rodney bites it, fragile, fragile, and John feels his teeth sink into the fine bones of his wrist like pencils inscribing their words. When Rodney’s done, he slides the black wristband back down and covers the bruises. 

+++

Lorne says to him, “Sir, I think we might have a problem.”

John pushes aside the reports he’s working on. “Distract me, Major.”

Lorne grins, but subdued. “Yes, sir. I’ve been listening to the men, hearing things. I don’t think they’re willing to do whatever it takes to protect Earth anymore. I read the reports from your first year here, how you and Dr. Weir were going to blow up the city to protect Earth. You think that would happen now?”

John’s been counting the tiles in the floor. There are seventeen on the east side of the room but only fifteen on the west. He can’t figure out where the two missing tiles are, but he knows they’re not there. 

“See that, Lorne?” He points. “How many tiles are there on the floor?”

“Seventeen, sir.”

“And over there?”

“Fifteen. It’s funny, Colonel. When I got here, I thought the Ancients laid out everything evenly. All matching, you know? When it’s so obvious that it’s not.”

John lifts his shoulder. “My men would die for Earth. So would I. You too.”

“Yes, sir.” He pauses, as if not sure how to continue. “But they might only live for Atlantis.”

“Is that a problem, Major?”

A few weeks later, Lorne decides to go back to Earth.

+++

Rodney’s sitting by the side of Elizabeth’s bed. Keller’s nowhere to be seen. The white bandage around Elizabeth’s head is stark against her skin, but he’s not looking at her. He’s staring up at the edge of the ceiling, the border of Ancient script running around the wall. Rodney might understand some of it because he often has to work with the Ancient language, but John doesn’t know what it says because he doesn’t understand Ancient, except maybe, there, that’s a word he does recognize.

Rodney’s staring right at it. 

John turns his head, slowly. To his right and to his left, to his north, east, west, and to the sea, all around, there it is again, punctuating the border unevenly. He exhales. Elizabeth appears peaceful, as if someone is whispering sweet nothings in her ear while she dozes.

+++

He sits in the jumper, his P-90 across his lap. It’s a comforting weight, something stable to hold to.

“I got it, Sheppard. If that thing so much as twitches,” Ronon tells him, but John can’t put the gun down. They won’t let him fly – they’re worried about the effects of having a Wraith suck the life out of him and give it back – and he’s hard. He can’t look at that fucking Wraith without getting hard. 

“The gift of life is reserved for our most devout worshippers,” it said. “Brothers.”

Teyla tells them that she has heard of the cullings occurring on M46-205 and the surrounding planets. They drop him off there. John’s intensely aware of the cloaked jumper behind him as he waits for the Wraith to wake up, the open door. 

He has named every Wraith that he’s had the misfortune to have conversations with. Steve. Bob. Except this one. “Brother,” it said, but there is another word branded into John: jzuna’ghai.

Jzuna’ghai, it hissed as it fed off him, infidel. He doesn’t know what it means until he becomes brother, il’laj, until his brother sets his veins on fire. 

John’s had his heart restarted before, shocked back into beating. His life being forced back into his body felt nothing like that. Every blood vessel inside him expanded. A mad pulse danced outward from the center of his chest, from the feeding mark, and he reveled in the wild thrill of it, the exultant rush and burn. He has been seared from the inside out, flesh and blood and bone. 

“Il’laj,” he says back to the Wraith, and the Wraith opens his mouth and exhales a satisfied sound. Its hand is still pressed against John’s chest, and all he can feel is the hand-shaped outline of fire, fingers splayed wide like his ribs, the mark in the center, the frantic careening of his blood throughout his body.

Rodney’s trying to talk to Carson as he’s releasing John from the infirmary. “This is amazing,” he’s saying. “You have to figure out how it works. The Wraith must be storing the energy in some discrete form until it’s used.”

“I don’t think so, Rodney,” says Carson. “You said that it exhausted the Wraith to give back the Colonel’s life. It seems to have sapped the lifeforce from every part of its body.”

“Think of the possible applications,” Rodney continues, talking over Carson until Carson’s words catch up with him. “Lifeforce? Lifeforce? That’s the official Voodoo term, is it. What is this, Star—”

“Time to go, McKay,” John says. He hooks his hand under the TAC vest Rodney’s still wearing and pulls. 

Rodney rolls his eyes and bats his hand away, but goes with him.

John barely makes it to Rodney’s quarters – they’re closer – before he pins him to the wall. He’s desperate for the smooth whiteness of Rodney’s flesh, for its warm resilience, for the life it contains. The force of John’s need slams Rodney’s head into the wall, and Rodney grunts and his hands dig into John’s ass before he shoves John off and spins him around so that he’s the one flattened against the wall. John lets him. There’s not one defensive move left in his head, nothing the Air Force has taught him, or Teyla or Ronon, and the only thing left to do is hook his leg up around Rodney and draw him closer. 

John is mindless now, and Rodney meets his every move. He rubs himself over Rodney, every inch of skin he can. He’s not sure, doesn’t care, if they’re fighting or having sex. They grapple, ram into chairs and the table, and the floor rears up, slams into them. John will have bruises tomorrow, yellow bruises with dark spots in the center, the way he squints into the sun, and broken red capillaries caused by Rodney’s teeth, by the way he says “fuck” into John’s skin, red from the invisible sun the Wraith forced into his chest, scalding. 

He fucks Rodney on his back until he’s practically sobbing with it. Sweat or tears or blood from his split lip, or all three together drop steady, steady down, and still he can’t come. Against the floor, Rodney’s hand shows up the pattern, squares that aren’t quite squares, squares that have 85 degree angles instead of 90, so that the whole floor seems to be in motion, caught in an undying sway. His other hand is cutting into John’s skin just below his waist, and John welcomes it. It’s what he needs, to be split open, and he claws into his chest, right where the feeding mark should be because he knows that if he could split apart the skin right there and expose the raw white of his bone, it would say infidel in Wraith cursive, a scrawl bold and clear under the welling blood, jzuna’ghai.

“Say it, Rodney,” he says, “jzuna’ghai,” and McKay rears up, confusion, maybe horror on his face, and says, “Sheppard, are you—”

But John doesn’t let him finish. He fucks him harder, the smack of skin hitting skin, and repeats, “Jzuna’ghai.”

“The Wraith,” Rodney stutters, “what did it do to you? Did Carson miss something?” and under John, he’s tensing, but he’s too close to orgasm to stop now, and John’s hand encircling his cock moves up and down in time to the liquid-harsh syllables of jzuna’ghai, infidel pounding the beat of John’s blood, of Rodney’s release. 

“Sheppard,” he gasps, and “Colonel.” His eyes are wide, and John rests his hand in the center of Rodney’s chest, fingers widespread, and there, right there, the curvature of the world bends backward, awkward yet smooth, twisting in ways it shouldn’t, and he slumps down, half on, half off Rodney. The left side of his chest presses into the cool city floor, and something pricks him right above his heart, through to the bone. 

+++

John is infidel to the Wraith because he belongs to Atlantis. It takes him thirteen ribs to figure this out. Thirteen words, all the same, inscribed into each of those thirteen ribs, marked as though with a stylus of bone, bone onto bone, the way only diamonds can cut diamonds. Thirteen orgasms denied to him, thirteen times McKay brings him to the edge, not once, not twice, but for entire days at a time stretching into weeks.

He can’t even remember. Perhaps he told McKay not to let him come; maybe he freaked him out so badly the last time they had sex that Rodney’s trying something different; maybe McKay just wants to teach him a lesson. Rodney’s hand squeezes the base of his cock and the pressure recedes, only to come back stronger. He says filthy things to John without laying a hand on him, until John thinks he’ll fall apart just from that. His fingers crisscross John’s body, even the most casual of touches becoming erotic, while he talks to him of energy output and jumper statistics. 

When Rodney writes onto the screen of his tablet in the labs, in staff meetings, off-world, it’s as though he’s writing directly onto John’s cock. For the sight of him, fountain pen in hand, white paper, oh god, crisp white paper like the shavings of a bone underneath his palm – for this, John would do the writing himself, carve into his own ribs. 

But McKay is implacable. He doesn’t care what John does outside his presence, but he won’t be the one to bring John all the way. John fucks one of the women, easy, eager, on PX5-012 and comes deep inside her while McKay sits outside the tent prodding the fire. His stick is blacked at the tip and glowing red, and as John comes, he feels each letter being branded into the bone of his rib, il’laj. Several weeks later, he jerks off under the shower in his room, and his white seed arcs down to the floor with the water. The shower tattoos il’laj onto the fourth rib down. He gets all the way to the ninth rib before he lies on his back and thinks of the Wraith, and this time il’laj is engraved so deeply into him, brother, that he thinks he has broken his rib, that it’s punctured his lung.

“Brother,” he is called on thirteen of his ribs, and his ribs close in on him, a warrior’s grasp, brother. 

+++

There’s this thing they do, see. John thinks he must have started it, because he’s always first with these things, with Atlantis, except that he didn’t. It was Zelenka, who loves the jumpers almost as much as John does. But the other pilots pick it up, and then anyone who travels on a jumper, and then anyone who leaves Atlantis at all.

It will take hundreds of years or longer before anyone will be able to see the worn spot next to the control panel by the doors of the jumper bay, the wear in the gate on the inside of the seventh symbol. 

John walks through the doors to Jumper One, and his hand brushes by the spot. Ronon and Teyla have gone before him, and though Rodney sneers at it, calls it a superstitious religious affectation, he still reaches up and presses his palm to the same spot that John just touched, for a second. Maybe it’s his imagination, but John always thinks that spot is warmer than the rest of the city. 

The only person he never sees do it is Elizabeth. Maybe that’s because she almost never leaves the city. But she’s always known everything that goes on. Because when she leaves for the last time, full of nanites, her hand lingers, a sliding caress. 

Later, John sees Radek lean his forehead against the wall. His eyes are shut. John turns around and walks the other way.

+++

When Rodney finally tells him to come, gives him his mouth and three fingers up his ass, John learns a new word. Anqelun, beloved, and it is not a word of the Wraith, but Atlantis’s own word, written in clear Ancient letters.

There are twenty-four ribs in the human body, and thirteen of them are the signs of his brotherhood and eleven of them mark him as beloved. 

He collapses onto the bed facedown. Rodney gets a cloth and wipes away his sweat. He thinks he feels him nudge the back of his neck, his lips, open, unsure, gentle where John’s hair meets his skin, but he must be dreaming. 

Later, Atlantis laughs softly at him, the way a woman laughs at a man she loves, and places a quiet kiss to the center of his chest, right in the middle of the bright white bone. She peels his skin away until blood scrapes against his breastbone, his ribs. 

“My infidel,” she says, right before she kisses the invisible feeding mark, the bold Wraith letters. She works her way down each rib. Her fingers trace the letters, and her mouth too, brother written thirteen times, and beloved eleven.

Her mouth is an O of wonder, and John can scarcely bear to look on her, for she is fair and terrible, like the walls of a citadel. 

“Brother,” she says. “Il’laj.” 

She whispers to him as she presses against him and strokes him with the back of her fingernails. Her bones are fine under the skin. “Brother,” she says with an open-mouthed kiss to his mouth, a row of kisses against the stubble of his jaw. He is brother as she flays the skin from his back, making John writhe and beg for more, as she breathes words into his vertebrae. She spreads him wide and between his cheeks, inside his body, he becomes her brother.

He has no unmarked bone in his body.

When he wakes up, his face is mashed into Rodney’s back, which is its own discovery. Rodney’s never stayed in his room before, not this long. John tastes the city and his new word on his lips. Anqelun, she leaves him, her beloved. She inscribed it on his remaining eleven blank ribs, all at once. He rolls it over his tongue, and Rodney murmurs, stirs.

“Stay,” John tells him while he sleeps, and he splays his fingers wide against Atlantis’s wall.

+++

About a dozen people leave Atlantis when the Daedalus shows up the first time. About a year later, one more, a marine, leaves. These are the only ones from the original expedition who try to go back to Earth, voluntarily. 

“No one will be forced to go to or stay on Atlantis,” General Landry promises. “When your tour of duty or your civilian contract ends, we will recall you if we no longer need you there, or, if we do want you there, we will present you with options.”

Of these fourteen from the first wave of Lanteans, nine return. Three of the marines end up in Iraq. It takes a few years before John hears that they died over there. Because they’re all Americans, they get shipped back to the States and buried or cremated in sanitized fashion. He can’t help but wonder, though, what the black-clad women would have found years later, had they been left in the desert heat. What odd markings, geometric designs, might have been etched on the bleached bones. 

One of the scientists commits suicide. The other simply disappears. She leaves SGC and returns to her home country, Colombia. No one knows what becomes of her. Some speculate that she gets caught up in local politics and drug cartels, the paramilitary groups that roam the countryside and city slums. Others prefer to think that she’s happy in Bogotá eating her grandmother’s cooking.

“She was a moron anyway,” Rodney says. “Remember the time she fried the control console for the irrigation system in the greenhouses? After I specifically told her not to touch the top row of crystals.” 

Zelenka nods. His fingers fly over his keyboard. “Was a bitch.”

Other people get recalled as time passes, occasionally a wayward scientist, more often the marines. They fight to stay and John fights to keep them – “These men are trained for Pegasus conditions,” he argues – and they win a lot of the time, but not always. On Davis’s last mission off-world, he sacrifices himself for his team when the Wraith show up. When they lose Mazari three weeks before he ships out, John asks the city to let them go. He doesn’t mean to, but he’s stripping down to his boxers, ready to go to bed, and suddenly he’s leaning against the wall of his room, sliding down to the floor. The wall is a slow, hot friction against his skin as he slips against it, nothing like it should be, so cool and smooth. He turns his face and rests his cheek on her flat. “Just try,” he says. “It’s not their fault. You can make it a little easier for them, I know you can.”

He feels ridiculous.

Maybe it works. 

Mostly, though, people who come to Atlantis stay on Atlantis. Carter tells them, laughing lightly, that the SGC is calling Atlantis their black hole. “It’s a joke, McKay,” she says. “They’re just kidding.”

“Hah!” Rodney points at her. “And they sent you.”

+++

Lorne comes back a few months after he leaves. He steps through the gate from Earth and immediately moves to his right to allow the men and equipment coming through behind him passage in. Which is the shoddiest pretext John’s ever seen, because he’s not blind and he watches Lorne’s hand sneak out from behind his back where it was clasped at ease, sneak out and caress the familiar spot on the gate, seventh symbol up from the bottom, right where they always touch as they pass through on the way out of Atlantis.

John crosses his arms and waits. He doesn’t miss the way Lorne’s shoulders relax the further into Atlantis he walks, even though he’s going to have to eat crow for his commanding officer in a few seconds. He goes to Elizabeth first. Their conversation is brief.

“Reporting for duty, sir,” he says, holding out some papers, his orders, to John. 

John doesn’t take them. He feels a bit brittle today, stiff and unyielding. He gestures with his head, and turns, leaves the control room. After a hesitation, Lorne follows him. They take a walk through the city, up into her rafters where John runs, where Lorne used to run with him sometimes, through her great ribcage that protects her heart and organs, her lifeblood, and then down, down into her belly. 

Lorne touches her carefully, as if he’s not allowed to, and maybe he isn’t. Lorne’s never said so, but John’s long suspected that he’s no stranger to the city and hasn’t been since the day he first stepped off the Daedalus. But it can take time to accept these things. John knows this, knows it because the words of her instruction are written into his bones, cut in deep, each one carved with his pain, his broken body, and when she kisses his wounds closed, he still hates that he’s so fucking grateful to her for doing so. 

Two nights later, John shows up at Lorne’s door. Lorne appears to be waiting for him. When they get down to the lower level, things are already in full swing. Zelenka’s bookkeeper tonight, and he takes one look at Lorne and says, “You know the rules. In you go.” He waves his hand at the center of the room. 

“But I’ve been here before.”

Zelenka’s unimpressed. “You left.” His expression is ever so slightly gleeful, evil. The men shift – someone yells “fresh meat!” to the sound of laughter – and John sees Ronon stretching in the middle.

“Shit,” Lorne says. But after a few blows, a few sharp jabs avoided and unavoided, he’s grinning. John knows what he’s feeling – not the exhilaration of a fight, like sex or flying, but the leaping joy of the city, the kind of satisfaction that’s not entirely your own and yet can’t be denied because it’s so vibrant, so full of life that you don’t want to miss even one second of it. It’s going to be a short fight, because one on one with Ronon always is, but god, it’s good to have Lorne back. 

“I didn’t know, sir,” Lorne tells him after. He’s favoring his right knee where Ronon whacked him.

John raises his eyebrow. “Well, now you do. No more excuses.” 

Zelenka claps Lorne on the shoulder. “Welcome home. It is good to be in this city of fools again, is it not?”

Lorne looks at John, and John shrugs and smirks. 

“Starship of the damned,” Lorne agrees, half resignation, half pleasure.

John’s smile grows into something genuine. 

+++

“Would it not be worse,” Teyla asks, “if Dr. Weir had been recalled to Earth? At least this way, she is still here in this galaxy. Perhaps she will one day be able to return to us.”

John picks magenta berries from M8X-382 out of a bowl. His fingers brush Teyla’s as she does the same. 

“Elizabeth knows a lot about Atlantis,” he says finally. 

“As do the Replicators,” Teyla points out. “Perhaps more than us. I do not think that she will be able to tell them anything they do not already know about the structure or technology.”

Surprisingly, it’s Rodney who says, “Maybe,” in the same dubious tone of voice that John was going to use. 

“But you fought so hard to save her,” Ronon says. 

“Of course I did.” He glares at John. “And I’d do it again. She’s one of us, and just because she’s left Atlantis now doesn’t mean that she’s not still part of the city, and I know not one of you thinks that. But—”

“But if there’s any risk,” John interrupts. Elizabeth would sacrifice herself for the city and her people, and if Elizabeth can’t do it herself, John will have to do it for her. 

+++

Assuming regular communication, it takes the IOA an average of 4.6 months to resupply Atlantis with requested and necessary items, things like sterile medical tubing for I.V. drips, antibiotics – although Keller’s working on making her own – white flour, Tupperware. It takes them an average of 7.2 months to send new personnel, which is actually the average of the (average of) 5.3 months that it takes to get new marines and the (average of) 10.1 months that it takes to get a new scientist, given that there are six soldiers sent for every four scientists/non-military staff. On average. As Rodney makes sure to point out, that’s (an average of) one physicist or real scientist for every seven not-real scientists that get sent, and it takes (an average of) 16.9 months to get a replacement physicist and (only) (an average of) 9.1 months to get a soft scientist. 

It takes the IOA exactly one month and seventeen days to send a new psychologist after Kate commits suicide. It takes them a further three months and two days to send a psychiatrist as well. Precisely nine months and twenty-three days after that, they send a whole team of their best mental health professionals through for a comprehensive evaluation of the state of the expedition as a whole.

“Peeping Toms,” Rodney calls the eval team. 

John smacks him upside the head. “Play nice, McKay.”

“Hey. I can do nice. I gave them access to every file we have on tests we ran on the city, didn’t I? All that stuff you had me do years ago on whether the city was sentient. All the medical exams Carson did on the gene carriers, natural and artificial, and the cross-studies he did on the saps whose bodies wouldn’t take the gene therapy. All the tests we conducted on the chair and on the mental component of the gene. What more do you want?”

“Not me. Them. I get the feeling they don’t trust your tests,” John tells him.

“What?” Rodney sputters. “I ran those tests under the most objective scientific conditions. They – I – fine. Let them rerun them all. It’ll take them months, and then they can just go shove their precious tests up their—”

Ronon looks back and forth between them. “These people are here because they don’t trust McKay?”

“I know. How stupid can you get? Those tests are all perfectly accurate. Atlantis has no A.I.”

John nods, and then shakes his head. “Not quite, Ronon. They don’t trust any of us, I don’t think.”

“Why?”

John leans forward and whispers loudly, “They think we’re crazy.”

+++

They interview John three times. John answers their questions while his ribs pinch into his lungs. He maintains eye contact at all the right times, and looks away at the right times too, over to the windows above their shoulders, the way military boys are supposed to, and he sees the uneven spires of the city rising up. Her own ribs and fingers, and they form recognizable lines against the sky, anqelun. 

+++

There are a few things John won’t tolerate in his city. They don’t come up very often: Atlantis’s people are a smart bunch, and they don’t cry to their commander. Besides, it’s not the things that people complain about that concern him. It’s the other stuff, the things not said. He has a feeling that the scientists don’t whine much to McKay, either, not seriously. He knows they kvetch with the best of them – McKay expects it and leads the way. 

Joaquin Padilla reminds John of Ford, a bit. He just wants to save the world and make his mama and CO proud. It was probably the latter quality that made SGC send him through the gate, but god, he’s young. His face lights up at the simplest things, like the apple pie that arrives with the Daedalus drop-off, or the triple moons on P7Y-302, Endor as someone nicknames it because it’s got some fuzzy animals the look like Ewoks. 

John makes sure that it doesn’t look like he’s trying to talk to him. Just a chance meeting, that’s all this is, a bit of target practice. Of course, the earmuffs they’re both wearing get in the way of any conversation, but John watches the way Padilla shoots, steady hand, evenly spaced, no flinch, a good marine, right on target every time. He doesn’t like the unnatural stillness of Padilla’s body, and he tries to think of a subtle way to say something.

After half an hour of this, he puts his gun down with an annoyed, “Screw this,” and waits till Padilla pauses to reload. John claps a hand on his shoulder, just long enough to get his attention. 

“Sir,” Padilla says, and he takes his earmuffs off and snaps to attention

“Yeah, look,” John says. He wants to rub the back of his neck, but doesn’t. “You don’t have to do anything against regs, you know that, right?”

“Sir?” Padilla’s got a great poker face. 

“Don’t fuck with me, Marine.” John straightens, clasps his hands behind his back. Boy’s more comfortable with a little formality, which makes John restrain a sigh. 

“Yes, sir.”

“I know you owe a debt to Anderson. Anderson collects his debts in a certain way. Now that’s never been a problem before. You’ve been on Atlantis a couple months, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Long enough to know that we pay our debts here.” John watches for something, anything, a change in the boy’s expression, and maybe he sees it in the tightening of his eyes, or maybe that’s a trick of the city’s light. “But that’s all you have to do, just even the score. Nothing more. Do you understand me, Padilla?”

“Yes, sir.”

John stares at him for a minute, hard. He can’t tell if he got through to the kid. “That will be all.”

“Yes, sir,” he says with a crisp salute. John salutes back, lazy, because either the kid’s going to make it or not, and John can’t do more than tell him that there are limits and he can set them. Still, he heads over to the labs, and along the way trails his hand against the wall and thinks that the city could watch out for him. Once in the labs, he slouches back and watches McKay hunch over his computer. 

“Yes, what,” McKay says several moments later. 

“Brought you a brownie.” John tosses it to him.

“Oh, god, the gooey kind.” It’s gone in two bites, and in the middle of the second one, Rodney looks up suspiciously. “Okay,” he says. “Whad do oo wand?”

John doesn’t even bother trying to look innocent. “Surveillance footage. Small arms locker, the empty corridors and rooms off the east wing of inhabited rooms, marine lockers. Anywhere else that’s semi-secluded, not high traffic.”

McKay crosses his arms over his chest. “You have access to all that already.” His expression is the one that says, “even you aren’t that stupid, so what angle are you playing here?”

“I want to be able to watch them in real time in my quarters and my office. For the next several weeks.”

This gets him two raised eyebrows. “Oh-ho, Colonel. Up to a little perving, are we? Hidden voyeurism kink coming out to play?”

John leans forward and gives him his best leer. “Feeling up to some exhibitionism tonight?”

Later, Rodney sits in John’s chair in his room and watches the split screen he’s set up. “You so owe me, Sheppard. Don’t think I didn’t see you staring at my ass for the last hour.”

“It’s a great ass. Feeds that voyeurism kink.”

Rodney’s mouth quirks. He jerks his head toward the screen. “What are you watching for?”

John glances at him. “Joaquin Padilla. He’s a good kid. He’ll be a good man in another year if he keeps his head.”

Rodney looks at him as if he’s going to say something, but doesn’t. “Huh,” is all he says. 

“Thanks, McKay. I owe you one.”

And there’s that look again, as if Rodney’s going to say something, or maybe deny something. “Yeah,” he says, and makes some complicated gesture with his hand. 

+++

A year later, he still hasn’t named that Wraith. He doesn’t want to trust him; he doesn’t trust him, but he can’t turn his back on him, either. That would be, first, stupid, and second, impossible. When he confronts him in his cell about why he was looking for John, about the Wraith ships appearing, the Wraith tilts his head as he speaks. Out of the corner of his eye, John sees the bars of the cage flash red-black with Wraith letters. Jzuna’ghai and il’laj overlap, blur into each other, as John is both infidel and brother to this Wraith and he to him. 

He could kill this Wraith – hell, he’d like to – but he cannot cast aside those words so lightly. They smolder inside him, and “He’s telling the truth so far, for now,” he tells Carter. 

That night, Rodney pushes him onto the bed and straddles him, pins him down. He uses more force than he needs to. “You were visiting the prisoner again, weren’t you.” It’s not a question. 

John stares up at him. 

Atlantis scores her nails against his bone. 

+++

Because the thing is that sometimes John wants to destroy Atlantis. Blow her up. Raze her to the ground, except that would be the ocean. Launch at her ever single jumper they have at once on a crazy suicide mission while he sits in the chair and orders her own drones to savage her. Rip her apart from the inside, tear out her guts, and scatter her to the winds for the scavenger birds to feed off. 

“Fuck me,” he orders McKay. John’s naked, and the blood congeals in the gash down his right side. 

Rodney goes into the bathroom. John follows. He watches, already hard. He’s been ready since he fell to the ground on his hands and knees and came away with red dust and grit in his skin. 

“You need to get those cuts taken care of,” Rodney tells him. 

“Later.” Rodney’s piss is golden yellow and pungent as it arcs into the toilet. He steps up behind Rodney and aligns his naked body with Rodney’s clothed one. Sliding his hand under Rodney’s shirt, he presses into his lower belly.

Rodney’s body smells like the red earth and the ever-present wind of P3X-343, like sweat and fear and John’s blood. There is something rank about it, and John pushes away his shirt to get closer. His body, Rodney’s, their human fragility and pain and blood and stink – he wants to rub these things into the clean, sleek lines of Atlantis, to shove them in her face with all the fury he possesses for the knowledge she has given him. For the innocence she has torn from him. For her gall. 

The bile is bitter in his throat. He buries his nose and mouth in Rodney’s armpit, in his groin where the sweat collects with the odor of arousal. They are three days unwashed, and John’s ribs ache from the beating he took on the planet and in his head are the words of the wind. It winnowed the Martian red mountains with a low keening and danced through the eerie, graceful mountains that were curved like a woman’s body arching under the wind’s touch. He woke up in the middle of the night on that world and felt as though he’d been dreaming in foreign, familiar words, words whispered into his ears and followed by starlit fingertips across his brow. 

He never expected to feel like this, never knew a human could and not fall apart, and he has fallen apart, each bone clattering to Atlantis’s grey floor, and she has reassembled him after herself. She demands everything of him, and if he gives it to her, he will be left stripped of his flesh, naked bones knocking together in a wild wind. 

+++

While walking down a hallway, John sees Khoury tap his earpiece and tilt his head. He’s been here since the beginning. As John passes him by, Khoury says something, and maybe it isn’t but it sounds like something Ancient.

Khoury runs his hand over the city’s wall.

+++

And there was this report he gave Elizabeth that was written by at least a dozen people. It was a consolidation of all the individual write-ups from his team, Radek’s science team of five people, three linguists, and one botanist, plus a few comments here and there from a handful of marines who were also involved on M9F-302. Lorne edited it. 

She reads half of it in front of him.

Later, when he goes back into the computer to change something and resend it, he notices other words next to the ones he’s written. Words he knows. Words that were there already, foreign words interspersed with the English, written in English letters and even a few sketched out in Ancient and some approximation of Wraith. Words he didn’t write, or at least he doesn’t think he did, but who can tell who wrote what. They’re on the first page, the last, and every one in between at least once. 

He means to take them out, yet somehow they stay.

“Nice job,” Elizabeth tells him the next day. 

+++

The evaluation team asks Carter if she’s seen anything odd, things maybe that she didn’t want to write down in the mission logs, and that would be fine, this is off the record, we don’t care what you didn’t report, just tell us. 

Apparently this is their informal chat-up because John knows she’s been interviewed by the whole team and individually, and he’s been in a senior staff interview with her as well. Maybe they think a casual conversation over lunch will yield more, catch her off guard. They obviously don’t know Carter very well, and he wonders what moron picked these morons to come here. 

She looks at them. “You mean odd as in besides the time one of my gate teams turned orange after being hit with bird-crap pellets from slingshots?”

The lady, Dr. Chemmanoor, John thinks, eats her greens. “Around the city, more.”

“Odd around the city,” Carter repeats.

“Yes,” Chemmanoor says.

“No.” Carter doesn’t blink.

+++

John is a chopper spinning out of control, despite his best efforts, despite all his denials and refusals to Rodney. He’s going down, black plume of smoke trailing after him the way human flesh burned on PX9-237.

When Carter tells him of her vision about Atlantis, about the city exploding in a wash of gold, the words protecting his heart flare like black-red coals, an insistent burn, her Wraith-hiss of fury and pain, infidel, jzuna’ghai; her supplicating hands held out to John, brother; her trust and adoration, anqelun. 

John is never going to see Carter’s explosion with his own eyes because he’s going to be inside the city when it happens, matching her bone for bone as they shatter. 

+++

Two days after Saunders, Vegas, and Morgenstern get trapped by the city’s quarantine measures and nearly die, John breaks a rib. It doesn’t hurt that much, only if he sneezes, and he would have just ignored it if Keller hadn’t dragged him into the infirmary.

“You’re lucky it didn’t puncture your lungs,” Rodney tells him when he shows up at John’s door that night, after he’s been released. “Move over, Sheppard. Unless you want to have this conversation in the hallway.” He pushes past him into the room, then turns around and cocks his head at John, who’s still standing in the doorway. “I let it go the last time, but not now. This is ridiculous.”

“Go away, Rodney.” John didn’t want to have this conversation a few days ago, and he doesn’t want to have it now. His hands clench into fists. 

“I’ve figured it out,” Rodney says instead of leaving. “I thought you were angry, and maybe you’re that too, but really you’re running scared.” 

“You’re about three breaths away from landing on your ass, McKay.”

“Oh, of course. When all else fails, there’s always brute force.”

“Yeah,” says John. “There is.”

“For heaven’s sake.” Rodney walks back past him and slides his hand over the door panel to make it close. Then he turns around and just stands there, glaring.

Something in John snaps and for a moment he’s afraid it’s the bone, shattering. “Jesus, McKay, give me a break. I feel like the skin’s being flayed from my back. She wants everything from me, and she wants me to just, I don’t know, hand it over.” He stops, barely able to hold it together. “Three of my men almost died here, in the city, two days ago.”

“I know that,” Rodney says stridently. “You really think that was an accident? Of course not. Those men are new, they don’t belong to the city yet. It took everything I had to pull her back, because of you, and next time, next time I won’t be able to do it alone.” 

John stares at him as hard as he can. “Fine. I owe you for saving them, McKay.”

“You twit.” Rodney pokes him in the chest before stepping back. His face is flushed and he looks as pissed-off as John feels. “You don’t get it. There are no debts between us.”

And John’s trying to process this, trying to understand what Rodney’s telling him, because he thinks Rodney’s been trying to tell him this for years and maybe John’s been afraid to hear it for just as long, but Rodney’s still talking.

“Besides, you’re not afraid she’s going to hurt you, or us, for that matter. You’re afraid that she won’t. This isn’t like that pathetic band of leftover Ancients who needed your help to Ascend, or like – like me pretending I could stop being me so I wouldn’t have to die. It’s so much bigger than that.” Rodney looks even more solid than usual, concentrating so hard that his hair stands up in front and his eyes are metallic blue, but he’s struggling for words, which – whoa. What does it take to reduce McKay to clenching his fists because words aren’t enough? “And that’s what scares you, am I right? Not that it’s a lie, but that you’ve found the truth.”

John starts to deny it, say no, this conversation is over. But Rodney snaps, “Face it, Colonel, that’s why there was an accident and those men got hurt,” and John shuts the hell up. 

“Because you keep making it all about you, about you not giving in to her, not losing yourself. Well, I have news for you, Sheppard: you already have. Because if my scientists and your marines have, if Teyla and Ronon and Lorne and Radek, if I have, then it goes double for you. You’re part of something bigger than all of us put together, and you can’t just get out of it.” Rodney throws his hands up then, as if flinging his anger to the four corners of the room. “And God, John, if you keep doing this – if you can’t let yourself believe, after all this time – ”

He stalks around John in a haphazard circle, and John rotates slowly, watching him, and he can barely breathe; he’s choking as pain shoots through his bones, femur, tibia and fibula, cradled in his pelvis. 

Rodney’s hands talk with him. “You’re fighting a battle you lost a long time ago. Only you didn’t lose it, you won. You didn’t lose yourself, you’re right here, and it’s – don’t you get it, you’re everything, and John – John, you could fly if you’d just—”

He’s too close to the truth, far too close, and John’s broken rib cracks, along with his voice. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, no fucking idea, so don’t you dare come in here and try to understand.”

“I have no idea? I have no idea? And you think I have an ego. Atlantis is my city too, all of ours. We all know,” Rodney yells, and his hands just freeze in midair and he stops. 

Because, oh. “I didn’t,” John says, and he reaches out to Rodney’s hovering hand to keep himself from doubling over as the air punches back into him. “You never said. I thought – you fucking liar,” he breathes into Rodney’s mouth before he kisses him. 

He was made to hurt Rodney and Rodney was made to hurt him, and they’re branded with the same mark, seared beyond the being. Rodney’s hands are large and sure on John’s flesh, everywhere, and together they sink onto the bed. 

He says Rodney’s name. He’s dizzy with something he can’t define, something that’s more than want, more even than need. He scores Rodney’s back, heedless of his rib, and slips down, cradles his heavy ballsac. Rodney cants his hips up, offering. 

“Atlantis. You get it, right?” John lubes a finger and presses it into Rodney, past the muscle until it’s smooth, smooth inside and John’s going to implode, fall apart, and that’s finally okay. “I don’t care what they say, or what the tests say. You understand? She’s—”

“Yes,” Rodney says. He gleams with sweat almost like glitter under Atlantis’s golden light. “I know. We all do, I promise, I promise you. She’s, more, oh, god, Sheppard, more,” and John doesn’t know if Rodney means that Atlantis is more or if Rodney wants more, and it doesn’t matter anyway because Rodney’s words are coming fast now. He babbles about measurements he’s taken, and windows he’s counted and decorations that seem perfect and are as asymmetrical as anything he’s ever seen, about angles that are off a few degrees and hallways that seem to be mirrors of each other and lead to mazes instead. 

“For years,” he gasps. “I think I’ve always known. She talks to me, you know, when I’m working on her. My fingers, my hands – it’s like her mouth and she just sucks you in, god, all those wires and crystals and it made no sense. It made no sense and I wrote entire programs to be more precise – and, John, she’s, please, more.” 

His eyes are wide open on John when John’s cock slides into his ass, slowly, so slowly, and the words turn into an indistinct babble as John fucks him, picks up the pace, loses the rhythm at last, and John’s going to bite right through his lip as he comes and finally, finally lets go, hands himself over to her and Rodney, because Rodney carries them everywhere he goes, his fingers deep inside the city, inside them both, smelling of John as he works, delivering John’s words, the words of Atlantis, to all of their people.

Because Atlantis speaks to Rodney though her consoles, out of her heart and belly, and John – John is Atlantis, flying and alive, shrinking in and expanding and exploding, ready to die for the ones they love, ready to burn them also, to write into their flesh and bones, to set her seal on them for the length of their days and into the beyond. 

Outside the window, there’s a starfield past the twin moons, sharp and white, resplendent. “Look,” John says.

“I see them,” Rodney replies.

+++

Down in the east wing, lower level, there is graffiti on the walls. Some of it’s old, millennia old. Some of it’s new. More keeps appearing, written in differing hands. 

Lorne comes in with a handful of new recruits and tosses an easy grin at them, at John, at Zelenka and Simpson and Miko, at Parrish and Randizi and Holcomb and Padilla. John salutes back at his new men but doesn’t speak to them. 

Later, when they’ve relaxed a bit, had a go in the ring, made a few bets, earned a few debts to repay later, John hears one of them say to another, “These bastards are psycho,” and John hides his grin. A few more comments like that, and Zelenka turns to them and says, scathingly, Jzuna’ghai. You will learn.”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?” one demands. 

Zelenka doesn’t back down. “Infidel.”

John leans over. “It’s Czech.” He points at Radek. “He’s Czech.”

Behind him, Ronon snorts. He leans back against the wall, arms crossed, and his body rests against il’laj.

“Brother,” Teyla translates, and “Brother,” Lorne says approvingly, and Ronon picks up the word from behind himself, hurls it around the room, until it reverberates in a loud roar between the men and women of the city. 

+++

This time, John waits. Everyone’s left but him, and the room is dim. The city’s glow picks up a bloodslick on the floor left from the night’s celebration. He still hears the echoes of his people’s cry, brother. It ghosts from the walls and corners of the room. 

It feels like hours later before Rodney finally shows up. “As if I need a fistfight,” he’d said once. And another time: “You know where these hands have been, right? Do you really think I’d risk losing that? The city,” he’d jerked a thumb at the walls, “knows better.”

John stays in the shadows and lets him bend over the shattered glass, multi-hued in the day but dull now. One of the newcomers punched his fist into it, into the third panel of the design, the one that threw off the whole decoration. When Rodney tilts his wrist up against the wall and begins carving, the night lights in the room play on the shard and send a dancing glitter out at angles. One catches John on the cheek, cuts a small bleed down it. 

Rodney scratches at the wall, etching line by line over and over until the city shows his letters. Il’laj, he writes, and John feels every mark being carved into his bones. Rodney never turns around, saying only, “Come here.” 

John steps forward to him and takes the shard from Rodney’s hand or from his own hand. Brings it into his own hand, into Rodney’s. Because he is Rodney and Rodney is him and they are both the city, everything and nothing and flying free. His side presses into Rodney’s and his hand into Atlantis, and he picks the word beloved out of his bones and whispers it to Rodney. He writes anqelun just above Rodney’s script, into his city, into Rodney’s chest, back into himself.

He never expected to feel like this, never knew a human could and not fall apart, and he has fallen apart, each bone clattering to Atlantis’s grey floor, and she has reassembled him after herself. She demands everything of him, and he will give it to her. They all will, all their blood and sweat and tears, love and laughter and life, and she will give it back triplefold, and none of it makes sense and it doesn’t have to, because she is their holy land. 

They are touching bone.


End file.
